Bond is back: Somebody, please shake or stir

Thank God for Pierce Brosnan. He brings the right touch of irony and physical prowess – certainly looks great for a fellow hitting his 50th birthday – even in the face of two nigh onto interminable hours of increasingly implausible action in the big new James Bond film, "Die Another Day," opening nationwide this past weekend.

The big baddy this time around is a devilish North Korean colonel, a graduate of Oxford and Harvard where he majored in – as he informs Bond with a sneer – "diplomacy and hypocrisy." Thanks to some nifty DNA work performed in an island off Cuba, for most of the film he is played by Toby Stephens, son of Maggie Smith and the late Robert Stephens, blond and blue-eyed as can be. He poses as a diamond merchant who has an ice palace in Iceland and a German tech who's building him a super instrument of destruction which, in due course, will blast through the DMZ, as the CIA honcho cries, "Should we call the president now?"

Screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade give a slightly fresh spin in setting Bond on his adventures by having our hero after a dramatic secret spectacular surfing arrival into North Korea being captured and tortured for months until he's grown an impressive beard and long shaggy hair.

Only about then do the credits start rolling with cyber-generated damsels in red flames swirling about, as Madonna sings along. When he is exchanged for another dastardly North Korean (Rick Yune with diamonds implanted in his cheek and for most of the film bright blue eyes thanks to that clever DNA work), Bond finds M (Judi Dench) thinks he has cracked and revokes his license to kill. But does that deter our brave Bond boy? Of course not.

One of the better moments of the film has Bond escaping from his British captors, swimming ashore in Hong Kong, walking dripping wet looking like the ultimate in a homeless wretch up to the desk of the Hong Kong Yacht Club and asking for a room as other guests stare aghast. Of course, the manager welcomes him and has him installed in the presidential suite in no time complete with a new wardrobe, haircut and shave.

Before you know it, our hero is in Cuba (apparently Cadiz, Spain stood in for Havana – and most convincingly so) to meet up with his co-star Halle Berry, who does look most fetching as she emerges from the waters like Aphrodite or Ursula Andress, a little homage to "Dr. No." Calling herself Jinx, Ms Berry shows all manner of secret agent killer skills, as well as winding up fairly promptly in Bond's bed after a couple of mojitos.

On and on the film goes. Now we're in London, meeting up with Col. Kuen in his Gustave Graves persona. He and Bond have a spiffy duel in a London club where Madonna, in little better than a walk-on, does a few minutes as a fencing mistress in a black leather corset. I'm afraid her performance is on a par with that of "Swept Away."

Around about this time, you begin to feel the end of the film must surely be nigh. No way. You have Iceland and an ice palace to melt and car chases on the ice (Bond does have a neat invisible Aston Martin whipped up by Q (John Cleese, delicious in all-too-brief screen time). And this all before Bond rescues a drowning Jinx from the melting palace and both manage to get aboard an implausibly huge cargo plane with our villain and his weapon of mass destruction – to say nothing of his fleet of fancy sports cars and a helicopter.

At this point, the technical efforts get a bit on the tacky side as if the producers were running low on budget. Bond and Kuen-Graves punch it out, while Jinx and the villain's lady friend, supposedly also working for M, take to swords to battle away. Why the lady baddy has to appear in a one-shoulder black bra top is a mystery, as well as why Jinx throws off her jacket – presumably the better to fence away in a white jogging top. Guess the producers just wanted to give the Victoria's Secret crowd a little something.

I confess my favorite moment of high silliness came near the end, as everything is coming apart like the DMZ going up in flames when the villain's father, a dignified North Korean general, says reprovingly, "I should have known you would come to no good when you and that woman (the female baddy) were on the fencing team together at Harvard." Maybe it was because I fenced when at Harvard, but the line struck me as sublimely ludicrous.

Bottom line: This Bond film – largely because of Pierce Brosnan – will no doubt do well at the box office. Will it knock Harry Potter from top place? Maybe because of all the really heavy publicity push the film is getting. At the large press screening, they were even handing out freebie CDs of Madonna and the songs from the film.